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This chapter provides comprehensive definitions for both school mobbing and workplace mobbing and distinguishes “mobbing” from the more commonly used term “bullying.” A conceptual framework for understanding bullying and mobbing as occurring along a continuum related to the degree of involvement of group and organizational dynamics and to the severity of the negative consequences for the victims is presented. It is proposed that mobbing and bullying represent different forms of interpersonal aggression. Negative acts or aggressive behaviors directed toward a target, the duration of the negative acts, intent to do harm, power imbalance, organizational involvement, and negative consequences for victims related to health, welfare, and job are key definitional elements that are emphasized differentially depending upon whether the term “bullying” or “mobbing” is used. In this chapter, each of these key definitional elements is presented and examined.

This chapter discusses the impact of workplace mobbing on job performance. How mobbing can result in voluntary or involuntary loss of employment with associated losses of health and retirement benefits is examined, along with the compelling research about job disengagement in the wake of workplace mobbing and the impact of mobbing on victims’ beliefs in a just world. The vulnerability of mobbing victims to loss of a primary source of their identity in the world—that of occupation and career, associated financial losses, and real threats to reemployability is also discussed. It is argued that the notion that people who are mobbed or who otherwise suffer workplace abuse can solve it by changing jobs is a misleading one and that mobbing creates employment double-binds for its victims that do not necessarily end by leaving or changing jobs, as necessary as that may be at times.

This chapter presents an overview of mobbing in workplaces, schools, and other organizations, and it situates mobbing within a historical context while distinguishing it from bullying. Unlike bullying, mobbing is identified as a systemic phenomenon involving the interplay of individual, group, and organizational dynamics. Detailed examples of workplace mobbing and school mobbing are provided with accompanying analysis and key points. From a historical perspective, the Salem Witch Hunt and the McMartin Preschool sexual abuse case are analyzed and identified as mobbings. It is argued that overreliance on explanatory frameworks focused on the individual lead to inadequate understandings of mobbing and represent examples of the fundamental attribution error.